I’m still making my way through In Defense of Sanity, a collection of essays by G.K. Chesterton. Today’s essay is “On Being Moved,” wherein the process of moving house, and having his belongings carried away around him as he tries to write, prompts him to meditate on death, deprivation, and gratitude:
In the end the dim beneficent powers will take the cosmos to pieces all round me, as my house is being taken to pieces now. . . . I go back to my writing table; at least I do not exactly go back to it, because they have taken it away, with silent treachery, while I was meditating on death at the window.
His chair remains:
I feel strangely grateful to the noble wooden quadruped on which I sit. Who am I that the children of men should have shaped and carved for me four extra wooden legs besides the two that were given me by the gods? For it is the point of all deprivation that it sharpens the idea of value; and, perhaps, this is, after all, the reason of the riddle of death.
A perfect meditation for these times.
Or, in the words of Joni Mitchell, don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone?